Making 360° Feedback Work for you – Our Top Tips!
By Ian Hirst, Greenbank CEO
360° feedback is a vital leadership tool. If your goal is to make your organisation more successful, you first need to make your people more effective, but of course the million-dollar question is how do we do that?
A key first step is to develop your people’s self-awareness – what do they do well and what do they need to improve? Research shows that only by collecting feedback from a variety of perspectives, can individuals truly understand how they are doing – it can give them uniquely balanced data to identify what is working and what needs to change.
Having worked with many different 360° surveys over the years, we have distilled some of our top hints & tips to make sure that your next 360° feedback project delivers the best possible results for everyone!
Here are our 7 top tips!
It is easy to focus solely on the 360° survey itself; the questions to be asked, the rating system and reporting. But what you do before, during and after the survey has been completed is just as important! Here are our top tips!
1. Be clear (really clear!), on the purpose of the project – and who sees the reports
What is the purpose of the survey? Is it purely for individual development or is it part of your performance appraisal, talent management or assessment process? This will largely determine how open people are in their feedback, so worth clarifying…
To help with this, a key question we always ask early on is “Who gets to see an individual’s report?” If the answer includes people other than the participant (eg their manager or HR) then that might be OK – but this needs to be explicit during all communication – otherwise you run the risk of people mistrusting your motives and therefore not being open in their feedback…
2. What happens next?
As well as being clear on who sees the reports, also get clarity on exactly how the feedback will be used. For instance:
Will there be coaching support to help individuals make sense of the feedback and start to put together action plans for development? Is this a one-off survey or will it be repeated in the future with comparison reports?
3. Make sure everybody has a positive view of 360 feedback!
Whilst some people are very familiar with the concept of 360° feedback surveys, for others this might still be a mystery! If the process is unfamiliar there may need to be more time spent upfront explaining and communicating the process both to individuals and their feedback givers.
This should include being clear about levels of confidentiality and anonymity for feedback givers who might be concerned that their feedback could be ‘used against them’.
4. Decide whether a standard or tailored survey is the best fit for your needs
There are pros and cons to both approaches. A standard survey might be faster to pull together and also allow you to benchmark with other organisations. A tailored approach will allow you to link it to your core competencies or a specific leadership programme…
5. Ask the right questions!
This may seem obvious, but we have seen 360 surveys that are very confusing and make it both difficult for feedback givers and for participants to make sense of their feedback.
Make sure the language will be clear and understandable to your feedback givers and focus questions on observable behaviour and actions, rather than vague judgements…
6. Select the right feedback givers
People may need to be given guidance on who to ask for feedback. We often suggest asking these questions…
- Whose view of you is most important – eg to your current role and furture career
- Who works most closely with you and has seen you in action enough to give you quality feedback
7. Encourage openness and maximise participation from feedback givers
You want the maximum number of feedback-givers to respond – and give quality, meaningful feedback. To achieve this, we suggest a two-pronged communication approach:
- Individuals should send out a personal note out to their own feedback givers just as the project commences – this personal approach is more likely to build commitment and lead to action rather than a note from HR or an external provider
- The system should send out regular communication to feedback-givers who have not completed feedback, encouraging them to do this!
Longer than this could mean it gets forgotten – less than this might mean you lose people on holiday, travelling or on sick leave. Also, be aware of big dates in the diary e.g. a lot of mainland European countries have a long summer break which needs to be considered within your project plan.
In summary…
360 feedback can be an amazing experience, however, by its very nature it’s intensely personal and needs to be handled very carefully – we hope that the 7 steps above will help you avoid the more obvious pitfalls!
360 feedback is impossible to ignore and can have amazing benefits – If implemented correctly! To help you achieve this, we have developed an industry-leading 360 web tool – Navigator360.
Designed by coaches rather than IT experts, Navigator 360’s easy-to-understand reports are perfect for immediately turning feedback into performance plans and have been used by leading organisations such as Henley Business School and the Center for Creative Leadership.
It is completely flexible, available across multiple platforms and will shortly be multi-lingual – so is designed to fit your 360 needs, whatever they might be!
In addition, the latest version of Navigator360 is designed not only for our own direct clients but for HR departments to administer themselves and also for other training / coaching companies to use with their clients.
If you would like to know more about Navigator360 and how it can help your organisation succeed in delivering positive 360 feedback, then please visit our new web site, which will allow you to download sample reports and also provide you with more hints and tips about delivering a successful 360 project!
Alternatively, please contact us directly via [email protected] or +44 (0)7812 074359